The first of the Orwell Prize’s events at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2010

‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’; ‘The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment’; ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’ Orwell was a staunch proponent of freedom of all kinds, especially of speech and of the press. But – with criticisms of the media flourishing, preachers of hate making headlines, the anonymity of the internet, and journalists complaining about libel laws – how free is free speech, and what should the limits be?